bcifi

Blucher ConversatIon by Brendan ZaChary AllIson

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“Yeah that reminds me of this one time when-” Blucher’s speech changed to spittle as the electric shock was powerful enough to make his testicles bruise each other. He tried not to moan as he dropped to his knees.

The moderator looked down at Blucher, who was now only a little shorter than him. “You just interrupted me again,” she said while pointing patronizingly. “Remember, young man, it’s rude to speak just because the beginning of your thought happened to coincide with the middle of mine.” The two other people standing at the bar looked to her for approval before they began chatting again. Blucher quietly stood up and listened. After a few minutes, the moderator turned to Blucher. “Your brain dominator indicates you *are* paying attention to the conversation. That’s good! You just have to respect other people. Conversation is not a full-contact sport. You see?” Blucher nodded meekly.

“You can talk as appropriate,” the moderator continued quietly. “That’s why we have this screen here that monitors the percentage of time each of us speaks. Now that you’ve been respectful for a few minutes, your Conversation Dominance Index is down below 25% – which is fair since we have four interlocutors here.”

Blucher nodded again, then pointed. “Ah, no fair trying to substitute pointing for words. Do that again and it’ll shock you again.” Blucher lowered his arm and nodded again. “It’s better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” Blucher nodded again. One of the others looked outside to where Blucher had been pointing.

“Madame Moderator?” she asked. “There’s a-” She trailed off as she got her first shock. Everyone remained silent for a minute as the moderator lectured them all.

Finally, the last person at the bar spoke up. “I think he was pointing because someone was trying to break into your car.”

The moderator stood up, looked toward the parking lot, and launched into an eloquent but vulgar tirade as her car drove off. The others at the bar smiled as her Conversation Dominance Index quickly rose to 25% before she collapsed in shock.

Author Commentary

STFU

This is loosely inspired by a relative of mine who just cannot be stopped from interrupting. But we’ve all known people like Blucher – and the moderator. With a few minor revisions, this short-short could seem more supportive of Blucher or the moderator, and that’s intentional. We can sympathize with punishing people who talk too much, especially while you’re talking. We can also sympathize with people who whine about it too much. Who deserves to be victimized by shocks or car theft? Both? Neither?

Blucher and Twain

“Blucher” is a character I’ve used elsewhere. He’s based on a Texan named Blucher from Twain’s The Innocents Abroad. Even though that book was based on Mark Twain’s experiences as a younger man, it seems that stereotypes are consistent across centuries. Blucher was big, loud, quick to anger, and bad at foreign languages. Yet he also seemed loyal, interesting, fun to be around, and even witty in his own way. We’d probably get along.

The phrase “It’s better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt” is an original from Twain, who’s one of my favorite writers. One of my best blog entries mocked revising Huck Finn, one of the most powerful anti-racist narratives ever.

Realism

Why are people at the bar wearing these systems in the first place? That’s the most unrealistic element, and perhaps the darkest. Is it required by the bar owner? Government? Some overseer?

This is one of the most BCI-less examples of BCI-fi. Take out the system to monitor whether Blucher pays attention to the conversation and it’s entirely free of BCIs. That system is increasingly realistic, especially with work on Auditory Attention Decoding (AAD). A few AAD projects have been nominated for BCI Research Awards (here is an example) and you can find many papers about it online.

Without the BCI, this is not remotely new. You can record a conversation, identify speakers, display who’s talking most (perhaps weighted by volume, interruption, duration of speech, etc) and devise punishments or rewards accordingly. I could have written this where the most or least vocal conversant has to pay for the meal or doesn’t get laid or some other effect. But it was more fun this way.

No such system exists, to my knowledge. So the barriers aren’t technological but rather social. You could make an app like this easily, but who would really use it? Blucher never would. Unless maybe he faced some prospect of a major reward if properly retrained.

Some quick math shows that, with four people in a conversation, at least one person will almost always talk more than 25% of the time. The first version had a 5% safety margin, but I took that out because it’s funnier now.

Hope

This one is also very much up to the reader. Would you like to converse with a Conversation Dominance Index? With shocks? Is there anyone you’d like to train?

Edit History

I wrote and posted this in November 2024.

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